Two local business owners are hoping to help bring Barrie’s fitness community back to life after months of shut downs.
Adam Houle and Dave Fraser run Core Training Academy and Performance Centre (CTA), a 6,500-square-foot private personal training studio in the city’s south end. They have created a unique new co-working model aimed at improving the gym experience for both trainers and clients.
“Dave has been renting to trainers for quite some time under Core Evolution and when the pandemic happened, a lot of facilities in Barrie were shutting down. Fitness professionals were left with no place to work out of,” said Houle, who serves as CTA’s personal training director. “We are trying to turn this into a facility where we can give fitness professionals in Barrie an option of a place to come and run their own business.”
The goal is for trainers to not only rent space to train their own clients, Fraser added, but for them to also learn how to market and grow their business.
“That’s where a lot of (personal trainers) fall short. They're trainers, but they just don’t know how to run a business. I’ve been in business a long time and have been through a lot of this so we are trying to help them understand how to grow their business," he said.
Becoming a fitness professional doesn’t stop after you get your certification, noted Houle, adding many people simply don’t focus the necessary effort on marketing and building their business.
And that’s where they come in.
“We show them how to track clientele, the sales structure, networking, etc., and really try to put them in a position to have more success with their business instead of just coming in and stepping into the dark," Houle told BarrieToday.
Together, Houle and Fraser have more 35 years of experience between them. Having this type of support when they were first starting up would likely have saved them a lot of frustration.
“You make a lot of mistakes and you fail a lot,” admitted Fraser. “Hopefully, you learn from those failures. That’s what we are trying to do, is teach people so they don’t have to go through some of the troubles we had to go through to build our businesses.”
“It would have saved me 14 years of trial and error,” Houle added. “I started at the bottom working at the local YMCA in Innisfil and then worked my way through a lot of the commercial gyms in Barrie. In that time, I met a lot of mentors and from each one I pulled a little piece of success and content from them to have more success for my own business.
"If I'd had something like this from Day 1, it would have put me in a position where I could be sitting with the professionals instead of being an amateur working my way up," he said.
With COVID-related restrictions starting to ease, Houle and Fraser hope to see the industry recover and move “full steam ahead” and are ready to help.
“If you don’t have a facility to train your clients, that really is a big obstacle for a lot of trainers. We want to eliminate that and get the fitness industry in Barrie back on its feet," Houle said.
